You are more or less describing Taiwan’s first two regimes - they added fairly strict quarantine fairly quickly though.
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Personally I would have gone further than @Kopstar’s ideas. I basically would have stopped everything bar incoming trade / goods and the like. There was no reason to continue with non essential travel.
Those that were arriving in the UK should be tested as @Kopstar has described. People returning from holiday when the cut off takes place?- 14 day quarantine in a hotel or Tower of London.
At least you gave then managed one avenue of the virus spreading into the country.
To me this is common sense and proactive. It also doesn’t need a whole lot of brain power to come up with the idea either. It’s kind of obvious.
Basically, by stopping inward routes of infection you can better manage it within a nation sized bubble. Their tier system might have actually ad a chance of working.
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I think what happened in the UK (similar here, less dramatically so) was an interaction of business interests trying to minimize short-term disruption appealing to politicians, and public health authorities letting the best become the enemy of the good. It is a variation of the ‘bars/schools/whatever can open, we have no proven transmission’ when the data cannot explain 80% of the cases because tracing collapsed.
You can see that in some of the public health commentaries about being unable to stop the virus from entering the country with X number of people entering the country - without them reflecting that the rest of their public messaging has been about slowing the rate of transmission, not stopping it. Travel bans/restrictions are not a silver bullet, but nothing is.
Beggars belief to me that here we are requiring tests for air travel only starting this week.
My latest pet peeve is people who are somehow able to hold the belief that children are not transmitting the virus to one another and their parents, yet acknowledge that the virus has been able to leap the species wall to cats and simians.
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You’re far more sympathetic than I am!
I agree there is no silver bullet but I do believe you have to cut off as many avenues of infection as you can. We still need imports and deliveries from abroad so that route is still open but at least you reduce the possibilities from other sources. It even gives you the option of being more strict with travel from high risk areas if needed. But doing nothing is just bonkers.
In my book we have suffered from the combined effect of government apathy, true UK Conservatism (we don’t interfere in private business) and assuming that if they did nothing we would be ok (herd immunity)
All of that combined put us behind the curve from Day 1.
Then continue to throw in the impact of a weak PM and yet more government apathy (i.e. I dont think they even take notice of the numbers) then we’ve stood little chance of getting any degree of control on things at all.
To me it is very much closing the gate after the horse has bolted and then wondering why the horse is a dot on the horizon. Another analogy would be wondering why the bathroom is flooding but not actually turning the bath tap off.
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For me the UKs biggest failing was right at the very start.
There was a reasonably high number of UK citizens in Wuhan. When the virus broke out the foreign office brought back citizens. There was no checks or isolation. We effectively seeded it in the UK. (They only started doing it in February)
The second failing was Italy. To an extent I could understand the belief it’s a disease from Asia we don’t need to worry. However as soon as it hit Italy and Israel it was obvious. The UK boarders should have been shut to those countries (just as we countries are currently doing to the UK).
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Jeez, in that case, I don’t even know what all the fuss is about 
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The point is the UK does not have 3 times as many deaths as Spain.
We are in the shit.
Spain is in the shit.
Chinese are okay though allegedly.
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Still confused about Astra Zeneca’s effictiveness. Somewhere between 62-90 % is what I’ve heard so far. Is there any new data?
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Well, we‘ve gone past 100k deaths today. Claps all round for the government.
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84767 unless the figures are from elsewhere?
It`ll be over 100000 soon enough sadly.
I think Mascot is going by excess deaths.
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Going by this.
So many of them preventable. Heartbreaking.
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I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the true number 
And still there’s people that deny the reality. I’ve been brainwashed apparently.
If I have it’s all your fault
I’m pretty confused about the whole trial stuff. Glaxo-Sanofi pulled their vaccine because of lack of effectiveness for old people yet none of the others seem to have any data what so ever for older populations.
The cheapest vaccine dissappears from the market and the most expensive is the 1st to get approved. Who would/could have guessed.
62-90% is pretty shitty if the sample population is young!
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Specially true for Bangladesh.
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Liked for the informative link,not so much for the content,as you say it`s heartbreaking.
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I’ve seen other sources seem to take what I assume is a median and put it at 70%.
Either way though, compared to the 'flu virus (44%) it’s not bad. I presume this is due to how it works in contrast to the RNA ones which claim a 90%+ efficacy.
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100% agree. I am exempt, and I just don’t go near a supermarket, they have too many selfish unmasked idiots.
I did hear that Meadowhall (Sheffield) were handing out lanyards to anyone who declared they were exempt like bluddy sweeties. Sickening!
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I dont think the UK has helped itself with regard to international relations much this year.
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